The idea that the barriers to entry mean that Google will never have competition are very high is true today but won't be true going forward. Once all books ar

The idea that the barriers to entry mean that Google will never have competition are very high is true today but won't be true going forward. Once all books are published (or reprinted) in eBook form, the conversion is potentially something which can be automated for all new (or still in "print" books). This will cover the majority of titles of interest. Additional titles can be scanned where they're of significant interest or projects similar to Project Guttenberg may do some of the work. Google has a head start but in actual fact has done a lot of their work when it's high cost / high labour where future competitors won't need to invest this level of effort. You could certainly see publishers providing access to their own works and, having access to the electronic versions of texts even for non-eBooks, they could do so relatively cheaply. Add a standardised interface over the repositories provided by each publisher and you have a decentralised repository, owned by the publishers which you'd imagine could compete with Google.